Divorce is up, personal trainers down

Last week, in the wake of the near-implosion of mortgage insurer Fannie Mae, and with rumours swirling about the fate of Lehman Brothers, where the stock has plummeted 70 per cent, I got an email from a friend. Instead of his usual pithy jokes, he sent me his investment fund’s second-quarter report. It read: “Even as sceptics, we were amazed that the Federal Reserve kept interest rates so low for so long, that Congress and the Administration spent money so flagrantly, that lenders reduced their credit standards to such lax levels, and that consumers continued spending as their economic prospects dimmed. The world is now feeling the downside of such profligacy, and there is likely more bad news to come.”

The pressing question, as I look around, is at what cost to us is this bad news – not just in economic terms? Bruce Yaffe, MD, who has a practice at Lenox Hill Hospital, notes that he is seeing a surge in stress-related illnesses. Dr John Ryder, a New York stress-management specialist, says he is seeing more people resorting to pills and alcohol.

These findings do not surprise me. Financiers tell me they spend their days looking at screens reflecting market movements, unable to work. Worst affected are former middle-aged employees at Bear Stearns, which collapsed in March. They saw a lifetime’s savings in stock wiped out. But people in every sector fear they could be laid off at any second.

Friends at Paramount suddenly got axed when Deutsche Bank pulled its film financing last week. Advertising revenues are down. “Flat is the new up” is the new joke in publishing. It’s not really that funny. College graduates are being told they no longer had the job they thought they had locked up for September. Small wonder that walking down Madison Avenue is like being in a ghost town. Divorce rates are up; personal trainers are losing their clients.

The toll of all this is unguessable. Physical breakdown occurs after two years of major stress, according to the sociologist Alvin Toffler. Two years … by then George W. Bush,whose “flagrant spending” my friend wrote about, won’t be in office to be held accountable.

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Tough times, but still they keep giving

New York’s billionaires, it seems, have not really noticed the downturn. They still spend their summers on lavish yachts in Europe, and are still flying in their own planes. Hearteningly, they also continue to give philanthropically on a vast scale.

Earlier this year, Blackstone Group chairman Stephen A Schwarzman gave $100 million to the New York Park Library. Last week, this town’s richest resident, David H Koch, 68, gave $100 million towards the renovation of the New York State theatre, at the Lincoln Center, where the New York City Ballet and City Opera performs.

In return for their generosity, both men get buildings named after them. But before you scoff that philanthropy is just a means to social climbing and tax-saving – I have heard plenty of withering criticism on the subject, always from friends in Britain, where philanthropy exists on a much lesser scale – consider this story.

Last summer my sister was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis: she is a young mother and was a first-rate athlete. I heard the news as I was jumping on the shuttle flight to Washington DC. By the time I got to the other end, and through an interview, it was too late to call the UK.

So, alone in my hotel room, I called around my New York girlfriends and, in tears, told them what had happened. They were amazing: uplifting and encouraging.

Fast forward to last week. My sister emailed to tell me that she, her children and husband would be doing a walk at the weekend in Windsor Great Park in aid of the Multiple Sclerosis Society and that she was seeking sponsorship. I emailed the same New York girlfriends and told them. Last Thursday, the day David Koch gave his millions to the Lincoln Center, my sister emailed me from London. “Who are ..?” She reeled off a list of names. They had all given her rather large sums of money. For my friends there is no tax benefit and no social advantage. “I can’t believe it,” my sister wrote. “They haven’t even met me.”

I spent the rest of the day whistling. It didn’t matter that the market bounced around like a yo-yo or that stores where I once shopped years ago were desperately calling because everything was now reduced to 80 per cent off.

Yes, these are dire economic times. But, just as our billionaires still go on their boats, so also, in this city, often criticised by outsiders for its shallowness and greed, authentic gestures of friendship and generosity endure.

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Time for Obama to Grow Up

A few months ago I went to a luncheon on New York’s Upper East Side and saw Michelle Obama speak, without notes, without hesitation.

Her husband was at that point still the underdog in the Democratic primary race, but the excitement in that room was palpable–and his wife lifted it further. She talked for almost an hour. You could have heard a pin drop. She concluded with the line, “Dream with me,” and you know how the story ended.

So imagine the excitement of many of those same people when they heard that Barack Obama would be appearing in New York next week–until, that is, the arrival of an email headlined “Exciting New Guest Next Week!”

Ooh, I thought. Al Gore?

I read on. “Senator Clinton” is to be the “exciting new guest” at the “Victory Fund” dinner and a Women’s Unity breakfast.

I wanted to vomit.

I thought the Unity stunt had ended, thankfully, in a painfully stilted mangle of matching blues last weekend in Unity, New Hampshire. Obviously I was wrong.

Actually, Barack Obama is also wrong, and someone needs to tell him so. Now that he’s got all those seasoned Clintonites on deck, maybe one of them can deliver the news: He doesn’t need to be entouraged–especially by the woman who went on 60 Minutes and said he’s not a Muslim, “as far as I know.”

America knows that in front of the cameras the Clintons and the Obamas have kissed and made up, but America is not stupid. We know this is performance politics and that Hillary, ultimately, had no choice but to endorse and commend the candidate who beat her.

For her, appearing with Obama is the beginning of her third political act, but also a reminder that, in her mind, her second act never really ended. It’s still her party and she’s still crying and she can if she wants to…

But for him?

Isn’t it time that the guy who suddenly seems to be shifting positions, who has seemed to have lost direction and his sense of self in recent days, re-found his voice, marched to the center stage, and belted out a monologue–alone?

If ever we need to be reminded why Barack Obama is the nominee, who he is, what he is capable of, and what he is capable of making us be, that time is now. He needs to grow up fast into the position he fought for.

Only an adolescent needs “mama” Hillary Clinton by his side.

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Good Luck Angelina!

As Angelina Jolie bravely brings twins into this world, she has my good wishes—and encouragement, since raising twins, as any parent of multiples knows, is something completely different from raising siblings one at a time.

Before I gave birth—somewhat dramatically and very prematurely—to my twin sons, one cold February morning five years ago, I thought I knew everything there was to know about raising twins: After all I am the older sister of twins, one of whom has her own set of twins.

Like all new parents, I was determined not to replicate my own parents’ behavior. I knew my sisters hated being lumped together and always being referred to as “the twins” instead of by their names. I also remember overhearing my mother on the phone telling people she needed to behave like a drill-sergeant at home to keep us all in line.

I was determined not to be a military mother.

And I wasn’t—certainly not when my newborn sons were teeny tiny, and hospitalized. I was, instead, a completely helpless mother. One baby was small—three pounds—but healthy, while the other weighed two pounds and was very sick. They were in different wards of New York Hospital’s newborn intensive care unit.

How to be fair to both? Spending time with the smallest as he fought for his life seemed imperative. Yet it would have been totally unfair to his brother to have left him alone in a strange place with alarm bells from other isolettes going off.

Thus was my swift, harsh introduction to a life where you feel you never have enough arms and legs; there is never enough time to hug one person at a time, to put Band-Aids on two different sets of scratches, to tell two separate bedtime stories, to manage it so that one boy gets the golf lessons he craves, while the other plays soccer.

Then there are the screeching volume-levels. Listening to two children shouting to you simultaneously about their day, as they fly through the door, shedding outer clothing on the floor before being told to put it away, then heading like missiles toward the food in the kitchen, makes you very cheerful—but also makes you wish sometimes you could get on a magic carpet and levitate above the madness.

And then there’s the guilt over the fact that they have to share toys, rooms, clothes, food, everything: “Why does Lorcan get to spend longer on the computer than me?,” his brother, Orlando, asked the other night.
The real answer is: “because Lorcan is more manipulative than you are.” But do you really want to say that to a five-year-old?

The plus side is that, for life, these two children have a friendship and a bond that other siblings envy. My two never stop talking to one another and inventing games—even if some of them are somewhat unfair. Orlando once suggested to Lorcan: “Hey, let’s play dinosaurs. I’ll be the dinosaur. You’re food.”

Small wonder Lorcan told his granny on the phone that his brother was “bossy.”

Yet they are in effect learning ahead of their time the rules of negotiation, as well as the boundaries of the individual.

As for me? I’m learning not to break out in a panic attack when I hear what sounds like an entire army platoon hurtling up the stairs towards my peaceful office.

After all, they fought for their lives. And this is living—times two.

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The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Supermodel

I know what it’s like to face a birthday and ponder the meaning of life. This Thursday is my birthday, and thinking about turning a year older has been keeping me up at night.

Someone once said to me, “You’d better know where you are going when you reach your mid- to late-30s—otherwise it’s a catastrophe.”

If that’s true, then I’m a catastrophe.

Recently, I’ve even been playing Diana Ross’s “Theme From Mahogany (Do you know where you’re going to?)” on my iPod, just to make myself feel doubly bad. (In truth, I hate the song, as well as the lyrics.)

I go over and over in my head the various crossroads and signposts I’ve seen over the years and second-guess the decisions I made, flagellating myself for taking routes that were, in hindsight, wrong.

Not that you’d be able to tell any of this from looking at me. I have a great job, wonderful family, all the luck in the world. But life is never really as other people perceive it.

So, knowing something of the modeling world, I can comprehend how poor Ruslana Korshunova, the beautiful, fast-rising young cover girl from Kazakhstan, could have thrown herself out of the window of her Manhattan apartment on Sunday, just as her 21st birthday was approaching.
Reports said she “busy, busy,” doing a lot of traveling. Well, as someone who is “busy, busy,” I can tell you that “busyness” is often a form of distraction, keeping you from mulling the important things.

It may be easier to fly to Milan, London, or Tokyo and strut along a catwalk than it is to sit on your own, with your family many miles away, and ponder whether what you are doing to earn a living is making you happy, or whether it’s actually what you wanted to do with your life.
Sometimes seeing so much of this strange world only makes you want to stop what you’re doing, escape your groove, and do something radical: save the rainforests, work in an orphanage, do something to lessen the world’s unhappiness.

Yet if you are only 20, you need the paycheck to send home to your family. Then there are the professionals who exert so much influence over you; many times they are more invested in securing the next glossy cover than in ensuring your welfare.

Korshunova has been compared to Kate Moss, but Moss, 34, has been around long enough to have friends outside the modeling world. When she went into rehab for cocaine addiction and thought her career was over, they were there for her. One told her, “Remember the importance of humor. If you can laugh, then you’ve got a sense of perspective.”

By contrast, young, overworked Korshunova seems to have faced her tribulations alone. When I read about her death, I wished I had met her. We could have talked about birthdays and the meaning of life. Maybe we could have done something radical together.

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Oh, for the days of divorce with dignity

The headlines here recently seem to have all been about sex – and costly, illicit sex at that.

First there are the lurid details exposed in the divorce trial between model Christie Brinkley, 54, and her fourth husband Peter Cook, 46, who allegedly cheated on her with an 18-year-old and had a penchant for looking at pornographic websites. We now know everything about life in the Brinkley-Cook household, from what they ate for breakfast to what happened when Alexa Ray, 22, Brinkley’s daughter from her marriage to Billy Joel, flooded the shower.

Then we get headlines about Madonna receiving New York Yankees star player A-Rod (real name Alex Rodriguez) late at night, while her husband Guy Ritchie is far away; meanwhile, A-Rod’s wife, Cynthia, is off in Paris with Lenny Kravitz.

The salaciousness has reached a level where I feel I need to wash my hands after reading the papers. What is actually more interesting is the financial repercussions. The Cook-Brinkley case is in court because, rather than settle privately, which most people do, Cook is contesting their prenuptial agreement. This, we are learning, is something you can do quite successfully.

For example, if one of you is a better parent, that turns into a major bargaining chip (Cook claims Brinkley was a self-obsessed mother, primping instead of ironing); also, if the pre-nup was signed in a hurry, that’s a problem. And so forth.

Reportedly Madonna and Guy Ritchie did not have a pre-nup; if it comes to divorce for them, she will be sweating at the thought of what could happen to her estimated $846 million fortune. Also, if it is proven that she’s had an affair, and if he did not, that will almost certainly cost her. Small wonder that she is reported to have hired Fiona Shackleton, who successfully saved Paul McCartney from halving his $1.5 billion fortune with his ex-wife Heather Mills.

Yet the process of going to trial is so undignified that you have to wonder why these people can’t sit down with a mediator and work it all out.

Everyone knows that when marriages break down, tempers flare. But these couples have children old enough to read the headlines – or hear their friends talk about them at school. Shouldn’t any divorcing couple be thinking of their children’s welfare first and foremost?

If they were, they wouldn’t be in court – and I could read about more important things in the morning papers.

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Trial runs for Wall Street’s finest

It’s muggy here – a point emphasised by the increasing number of sweating brows I’ve watched on TV the past week. These brows mainly belong to men in suits who are on their way in and out of courthouses on charges of white-collar crime.

One theory, according to prosecutors and TV pundits, is that desperate economic times encourage desperate measures. Statistics from the FBI show the number of investigations is rising.

So in one week we’ve watched Matthew Tannin and Ralph Cioffi, managers from Bear Stearns, charged with securities and wire fraud, walk uncomfortably in handcuffs. There have been pictures of Sam Israel, the hedge-fund trader, convicted for fraud, now allegedly on the run having faked his own suicide.

Then, most sensationally, there’s the good-looking, dark-haired Italian Raffaelo Follieri, the former boyfriend of actress of Anne Hathaway, who had planned to spend his 30th birthday last weekend in Capri but was instead behind bars.

Follieri’s crime? He is accused of falsely telling investors that the Vatican had appointed him to manage its financial affairs and wanted to divest itself of church properties. With the money he got, the charge against him says, he spent at least $6 million on private jets, holidays with Hathaway, dog-walkers and, intriguingly, flying a doctor to Italy from England at the cost of $30,000 for a “minor ailment”.

I wouldn’t rate the chances of this drive against white-collar crime that highly though. If such crime is rising with the economic downturn, there is no certainty that the authorities will be able to keep up.

Indeed, a recent announcement by 32 prosecutors said the authorities had been over-zealous towards large corporations in the post-Enron environment and urged caution. There is a risk when large firms are involved that those accused become scapegoats for a large institution’s poor judgment and for a general climate of panic.

But if I were Follieri I wouldn’t find comfort in all that. He is not part of a large institution. He is a bold young man with Icarus characteristics who would have behaved the way he did regardless of the economic climate. The only way he is feeling the downturn is that, as of Friday, two days after he was indicted, still no one had posted his $21 million bail.

This piece was first published by the London Evening Standard.

Follow Vicky Ward on Twitter: www.twitter.com/VickyPJWard

Michelle will be a fine feisty First Lady

A friend saw Laura Bush recently and told me how “poised” our First Lady was: “petite” and “gracious”, a “listener”, not a talker. These are the traditional qualities we are supposed to admire in a First Lady. Feisty Democratic women have had a harder time fitting the mould than their Republican counterparts, except for Jackie Kennedy.

So now poor Michelle Obama is confronting the media speculation of how she will fare in the White House. The odds are already stacked against her, thanks to charges of anti-patriotism, radical racism, and – most absurdly, because of her fistbump with her husband – the notion that she is a secret terrorist. Even Hillary Clinton, who as First Lady played the role of political dartboard sans pareil, never faced hostility on this scale.

But Michelle Obama with her good looks, her lucrative job, her opinionated views on race – and other things – is a lightning rod for controversy. So she’s playing the game that all potential First Ladies have to; appearing on TV shows aimed at housewives, and trying to show a “softer” side.

Not everyone is buying it. A columnist in the conservative New York Post described her as looking “bored and superior” on The View, a morning show.

Of course she looked “superior” – she was the tallest woman on screen. Bored? She’s a Harvardeducated lawyer being forced to prove her girliness in the equivalent of an on-air sewing circle.

Michelle Obama has no need to spell out her femininity, or her wifely assets: she is brimming with both. Her affection for her husband may have been their winning weapon on the campaign; he appeared to be the only candidate with a sex life.

If the Right-wing press keeps stooping to outdated pettiness in criticising Michelle, it will hand the Obamas the election. The point is that the Obamas are about change: polls show America wants this.

So we expect Mrs Obama to modernise the traditional role of First Lady. We know she is clever, so her reforms will be carefully calculated. She has watched Hillary’s missteps as First Lady and she now has Clinton’s ex-campaign manager, Patti Solis Doyle, to help her avoid any clunky repetition.

That Laura Bush wrote to Michelle last week, commiserating with her, showed great personality and generosity of spirit from the present First Lady. It was also a reminder that the key to being a successful First Lady, no matter what the critics say, is to stay true to who you are.

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Talking Politics in London

I returned from London last week after a whirlwind trip of reporting for Vanity Fair and seeing old friends. It’s funny how the very second you get off the plane at Heathrow, life seems to slow down compared to Manhattan’s frenetic pace. (Unless, of course, you are Naomi Campbell and Heathrow baggage-handlers have lost your luggage…)One of my stops was the cozy Notting Hill house of British shadow chancellor George Osborne, 37, and his auburn-haired wife, Frances, who has just written a best-selling biography, The Bolter. The book, which is about Frances’s oft-married great-grandmother, Lady Idina Sackville, is due out next spring in America. The conversation wasn’t all politics at the Osborne abode. After red wine and takeout, George cracked the Indiana Jones whip he’d bought for his 7-year-old son and described the boy’s delight when he received the plaything. Truth be told, the toy seemed to be giving the boy’s youthful-looking father considerable pleasure as well. Every time the whip cracked, the theme music from the movie played.

The great thing about this couple, whom I have known for many years—Frances and I have been friends since we were teenagers—is that they never take themselves too seriously, unlike many Americans of equivalent status. I remember I was once telling George some story about my life in New York, when he began searching for a pen and paper.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Making notes for the literary or film-writing career I’ll have to develop when my political one fails,” he deadpanned.

But he’s not going to fail. The current Labour government is highly unpopular in Britain, and chances are the young Conservatives will be the next government, and George the next chancellor.

Monday took me to the set of Harvey and Bob Weinsteins’ movie Shanghai, a period thriller set in 1941 starring John Cusack, who is showing an unswerving determination to highlight both the death toll and fiscal cost of the war in Iraq, as well as the iniquity of profiteering from the war.

He films all day, then stays up all night, either to go on shows like MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann to promote his film War, Inc. (still remarkably holding up despite its miniscule marketing budget), or record anti-McCain television commercials for MoveOn.org.

On Olbermann’s show last week, Cusack said he wouldn’t shut up until Obama is in office and Bush was impeached. You have to hand it to Cusack—the man fights for what he believes in.

Speaking of Bush: I also went to Scott’s, the new “it” restaurant in London, where my companions included the British historian Andrew Roberts and his wife, financial publicist Susan Gilchrist. They were looking forward to dinner at 10 Downing Street with the president and first lady, along with Rupert and Wendi Murdoch. I later learned that Roberts was seated next to President Bush, who has invited him to dinner at the White House before his term runs out. To prove how serious he was, Bush wrote down his personal phone number.

Now all I have to do is ask Roberts for it, give it to Cusack, and watch what happens. I’d pay for tickets to see that—wouldn’t you? Their exchange would likely make Naomi Campbell’s airport outburst look tame.

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London, you’ve changed for the better

For the first time in a year I have spent the week in London, working and seeing friends. It has been an eye-opening experience; after all, it has been 11 years since I lived here.

I was expecting to complain about the weather. When I left New York the temperature was in the high nineties. But here it has not yet rained and the temperature has been pleasantly warm. Other things are refreshing too. Unlike their New York counterparts, my English friends’ every other sentence is not about the economy. “The recession is coming,” one person in finance told me, “but we relegate it to background talk.”

People prefer talking about their children and the Indiana Jones movie to what they’ve been doing at work. A girlfriend told me how an expat English banker friend recently bored everyone with a monologue about his job throughout dinner. No one will be rushing to ask him back.

I have been lunching well. I cannot say I enjoyed Maze, in Grosvenor Square: my idea of lunch is not four laborious courses, each served in a martini glass. The Wolseley was better: my lunch companion offered me a glass of champagne. I don’t think I have ever drunk alcohol at lunch in Manhattan. Here, I drank the champagne willingly; for once, it was fun.

To my surprise, I’ve been out dancing three times, finishing Thursday night at Mahiki with 300 Sloanes under 30, dancing to disco music written well before they were born. They dance with a furious frenzy, in groups, often of the same sex. That didn’t happen when I lived here.

Taxi drivers are, as ever, opinionated, but also thoughtful: one reminded me not to forget my phone as I got out. In fact, in general the service has unquestionably got better; to my surprise I found you can get a pedicure on a Sunday.

But other things don’t change. I went to a wedding where, during one speech, the groom’s genitalia were graphically mocked. I realised, with horror, that I was undergoing a uniquely “British” moment.

So, London, thank you. I’ve enjoyed my week here. Now I need to go go home, detox and sleep. The pang will come when I get the bill for this trip on my credit card – and it will be have to be paid in US dollars.

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